Firefly Beta Release

We are proud to release the first public beta version of Firefly, our new wallet for Chrysalis. This marks an important milestone in the lead up to Chrysalis - the biggest network upgrade in the IOTA Foundation’s history - and gives the community a first taste of what the future of IOTA has in store. The Chrysalis migration will start on April 21st 2021 and the network will go live on April 28th 2021. A production-ready version of Firefly will be released for the Chrysalis migration. The migration is not possible yet!

Today’s Firefly Beta release showcases the new Chrysalis Network on our Public Testnet. This means extremely reliable transactions, very fast confirmations, reusable addresses, UTXO-based ledger state and more. We welcome you to try out the wallet and enjoy the new Chrysalis protocol.

Download Firefly

Firefly Beta is available to download on Mac, Windows and Linux. View the release here. Please note that this is a test version you can not use for IOTA tokens. The production-ready version of Firefly, able to handle IOTA tokens, will be released prior to the Chrysalis migration.

You can get tokens from the testnet faucet. Simply copy an address from Firefly and hit “request”.

Today we are also open sourcing the Firefly codebase. We will be using the issues and discussion boards so whether you are a designer, developer or simply an interested user feel free to get involved.

A robust wallet built for the future

Firefly has gone through many design iterations and we have arrived at what we think is an excellent balance of minimalistic design and usability. Every feature has been carefully thought through to reduce friction for beginners while still catering for more advanced users. Every view has been designed with future expansion in mind. This first version of Firefly is a very solid wallet that has been engineered for the long haul. We see Firefly as the gateway to the IOTA ecosystem and we have big plans for the future.

At Firefly’s core are two important open-source Rust libraries. Stronghold, which entered Beta last week, is a significant innovation for the IOTA Foundation and the first open-source library of its kind in our industry. Stronghold has two key functions for Firefly. Firstly, it serves an isolated memory enclave for cryptographic operations. This means that whenever the wallet generates an address or signs a transaction, the process executes in isolation from the rest of the application. This important security barrier will allow Firefly to add all of the exciting functionality planned for the future, which can rely on cryptographic operations being performed by Stronghold without private key exposure. Second, Stronghold provides an encrypted key-value store for backing up your wallet secrets and transaction history. Stronghold backups can be used to import your profile on other devices.

The other key library is wallet.rs which takes care of all transaction logic and accounting. This modular core, written in Rust, together with the lightweight Svelte frontend makes for a highly performant and scalable application. Firefly has also been comprehensively audited by an external audit firm and will undergo additional audits as new functionality is added.

What’s next

Firefly has been in closed testing for a few weeks and is now in a largely stable state. Over the coming weeks - in the lead up to the Chrysalis migration - we will be fixing any remaining bugs, testing the migration within a closed group, testing the Ledger Nano integration and adding any minor features that didn’t make it into this first beta version.

Once Chrysalis goes live, the team’s attention will shift to building the mobile version, while we also work on features like contacts and chat, and explore some of IOTA’s upcoming features, like Digital Assets.

Firefly has been a big team effort with involvement throughout the IOTA Foundation. The Firefly development team (Lucas Nogueira, Umair Sarfraz, Begoña Álvarez, Martyn Janes, Rajiv Shah and Charlie Varley) have worked day and night to get the app ready and the Design and UX Teams (Andrew Brough, Janis Vegis, Aleksa Krstic, Marcos Andrade, Igor Nilsen and Sabri Goldberg) have truly excelled themselves.

Many thanks to the fantastic group of alpha testers from the IOTA community who dedicated their evenings and weekends to bug hunting, improvement suggesting and feature testing. And a huge thank you to the translators, who have gone over and above and raced each other to complete their translations every week. We have been humbled by everyone’s willingness to contribute their time towards Firefly and the IOTA project. Onwards and upwards.

Firefly will develop in the open and the team is always open to your suggestions and feedback. You can join the conversation in #firefly-discussion on our official Discord.